Biography

Early life

Spencer was born and lived in the Thames-side village of Cookham in Berkshire. The Methodist Chapel in Cookham, which he attended, is now the Stanley Spencer Gallery, a gallery dedicated to his art which holds over 100 items of his work and has two exhibitions a year. His father was William Spencer, a music teacher. His younger brother, Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979), was also a talented painter of landscapes.

From 1908 to 1912, Spencer studied at the Slade School of Fine Art at UCLLondon, under Henry Tonks and others. His contemporaries at the Slade included Dora Carrington, Isaac Rosenberg and David Bomberg. Spencer's attachment to his home was so strong that he commuted from Cookham to the Slade, earning the nickname "Cookham" from other students. His house is located near Cookham Rise Primary school, and is currently still used for residential purposes.

War service

In 1914 Spencer began his service in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War. In 1916 he was sent out to Greece under the command of the 68th Field Ambulance unit. At the ending of the war in 1918 Spencer was asked to paint a work as a war artist for a Hall of Remembrance, a painting which was based on his own experiences and which became "Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916". Between the wars, Spencer received a lengthy commission to paint a large war memorial mural, which eventually included his "Resurrection of the Soldiers" altarpiece at the Sandham Memorial Chapel.

Spencer served as a War Artist in the Second World War, most famously depicting shipbuilding on the Clyde. After the war ended in 1945, Spencer turned to more visionary work, as did many British neo-romantic painters and artists.

Later years

In 1925, Spencer married art student Hilda Carline. Daughter, Shirin, was born in November of the same year; their second daughter, Unity, was born in 1930. Carline divorced Spencer in 1937. A week later, Spencer married artist Patricia Preece. After Spencer’s marriage with Preece fell apart, Spencer visited Carline and that continued throughout her mental breakdown, until her November 1950 death from cancer.

"The small man with twinkling eyes and shaggy grey hair (often wearing his pyjamas under his suit if it was cold) became a familiar sight wandering the lanes of Cookham pushing the old pram in which he carried his canvas and easel."
Spencer was knighted in 1959. He died of cancer at Cliveden, Buckinghamshire in the same year.

Art

He held deep Christian beliefs, and many of his works were intensely religious in nature. Many, such as The Resurrection, Cookham (1923–27), set biblical scenes in Cookham and depicted the villagers as characters.

Today these works can fetch immense sums at auction, but during his lifetime his landscapes were more successful commercially, so Spencer was on occasion pressurised into painting them by his dealer.

Legacy

In November 2006, the Imperial War Museum asked Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson to lead a campaign to fund restoration of Spencer's works focusing on the shipyards of Glasgow, and select other works including Cookham. Ferguson agreed, as his father, brother and an uncle had all worked in the yards at the time of Spencer's painting.

Spencer, Stanley, and Fiona MacCarthy. Stanley Spencer: An English Vision. [New Haven, Conn.]: Yale University Press in association with the British Council and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1997. ISBN 0300074263